What The World's Metropolises Would Look Like With No People

Like a scene from The Walking Dead or Omega Man, photographers Lucie & Simon reduce some of the busiest places on Earth to barren landscapes. You can almost hear the oppressive silence but how did they accomplish this feat?

The pair reportedly employed a neutral density filter, “normally used by NASA for analysing stars” to achieve this effect. ND filters essentially equalise all wavelengths of light passing through them. This allows photographers to take long-exposure shots and easily cut out the any blurring caused by people moving around. The solitary people you see in some of the shots simply stood still for the duration of the exposure. [Lucie & Simon via Popular Science]

i call bs.
theres no way they got a picture of all those roads without a single sign of a car, (times square especially). think about all the traffic, it would be impossible for them to get pictures that clear of all the roads by the way its explained there...

Slightly ignorant. An ND filter allows a photographer to decrease the shutter speed significantly so that any moving object that ceases to stop is not recorded in the final image because the light from the environment or background 'overwrites' where the moving objects used to be.

What a load of nonsense. That's effectively saying it makes everything the same colour. An ND filter just attenuates all visible light passing through it. Think glorified sunglasses lens. One thing they do is allow for slower shutter speeds, which increases motion blur. With a slow enough shutter speed, anything that moves more or less blurs itself invisible.